Debates connecting social and economic policies create social awareness and movement towards a UBI – positive change can exist in the status quo. At worst, prefer the permutation over the alternative alone.

However, basic income is being increasingly discussed in a more pragmatic context. This discussion is mostly concerned with the efficiency part of the above claim. Here, basic income is proposed as the most viable way of reconciling two of the welfare state’s central objectives – the alleviation of poverty and full employment – while at the same time allowing scope for making the labour market function in a more flexible and dynamic way. One of the reasons why basic income has attracted interest is that it seeks to reinterpret the compatibility of these two central objectives, reflecting the fact that social policy and economic policy can no longer be conceived separately. Thus, in recent years, basic income has appeared on the agenda of institutional reform as a pro- posal which combines adequate social protection with the demands of flexible labour markets, and may lead to a more equitable distribution of income, paid work, care work and free time among men and women.As such, it has to be pitted against the claims of (partly or fully) competing policy instruments in the welfare state: collective working time reduction, subsidized employment, paid parental care, early retirement, education- al and sabbatical leave provisions, the minimum wage, and schemes of ‘workfare’.

This book is divided into two distinct but interrelated parts, both of which reflect the main topics of the 1998 Congress of the Basic Income European Network. 1 The first part, ‘Policy Objectives’, analyzes the potential of basic income vis-à-vis other policy schemes to achieve the above-mentioned goals of welfare state reform. The second part, entitled ‘Political Chances’, reviews the state of the debate on basic income in var-ious European countries. Although the book can be seen as following up on Arguing for Basic Income, it has a different point of departure. Arguing for Basic Income concentrated on the ethical controversies around unconditional grants, which, as noted above, have been part of the general debate from the start. It attempted ‘... to spell out a plausible conception of the just or good society which could provide firm foundations for the legitimacy of an unconditional income’ (ibid.: 8) and ‘… to derive basic income from an explicit formulation of the ideal of a free, equal or good society’ (ibid.: 29). These controversies, which are concerned with rethinking the regulative principles of solidar- ity and justice in the welfare state, have not yet come to rest.2 As customary in applied political philosophy, the arguments are exchanged at a high level of abstraction. Most recently, the main question has been whether granting people a substantial, or even the maximally sustainable, basic income is an appropriate instrument of liberal-egalitarian justice. The answers seem to depend on how the egalitarian aim of compensating for unequal endowments can be combined with the liberal aim of holding people respon- sible for their personal choices. At the level of detailed policy implications in societies with developed welfare state institutions, competing interpretations of liberal-egalitar- ian justice then generate different positions regarding the desirability of either work- sensitive or unconditional compensation to the worst-endowed members of society: the working poor, and those who are more or less chronically excluded from the labour market, and hence depend on transfer income. In this debate, the proposal of introducing a basic income in the welfare state typically serves as a testing ground for exploring the relative attractiveness of abstract normative positions entertained on the political Left.3

While these theory-driven controversies still remain largely unsettled, the fact that they are being fought out in the international arena in the area of welfare-state policies to some extent explains why basic income has become a proposal of some interest in the problem-driven debate on social security reform. It is this debate which provides the perspective of the present book. Rather than trying to link the proposal of basic income to philosophical principles of justice, here, we want to focus on how it fares relative to other policy instruments which claim to promote politically salient objec- tives of welfare reform.There is widespread consensus among policymakers and other professionals that the welfare system has to be adjusted, but also disagreement about the direction of reform. Is it time to pare down the benefits of the welfare system, by mak- ing it ‘meaner and leaner’, allowing it to survive global market competition and more intense intra-European competition for advantageous tax regimes? Or do we instead have to find new ways to maintain the basic protective features of the European welfare state in the face of these challenges? To what extent is the debate on the form that wel- fare arrangements should take influenced by the problems of the inactivity traps beset- ting means-tested welfare arrangements, the persistence of (long-term) unemployment among the low-skilled, and the difficulty to get rid of poverty despite the affluence of European countries? 4 Last but not least, what requirements of re-design are being imposed by flexible work arrangements, the decline of breadwinner families along with increased female participation, and the greater difficulties of combining work and fam- ily responsibilities?

In addressing such questions, arguments for and against basic income figure at a far lower level of abstraction.They are more influenced by the concrete social problems in different welfare states than by general normative positions.Yet, as the contribution of Frank Vandenbroucke and Tom Van Puyenbroeck in this volume will show, it is impor- tant not to lose sight of the link between these two levels of debate.Though most of the contributors of basic income in this book are to some extent moved by egalitarian or solidaristic justice, such normative commitments often appear obliquely, against the background of what is often called the ‘new social question’.This is the real threat of a permanent divide between on the one hand job holders with a strong labour market attachment (secure full-time employment with full entitlements to social insurance) and marginal groups with intermittent labour market careers (insecure access to bene- fits of social security, and old-age pensions) on the other.5 In Arguing for Basic Income, the importance of basic income for addressing the new social question was described by Van Parijs (1992: 6-7) as follows:

… it can no longer be assumed that an overwhelming majority of households can cover their basic needs thanks to the wages they owe to the job one of their members currently holds or to the benefits they owe to the job one of their members used to hold. Under this assumption, central to the conception of the modern welfare state, the safety net of social assistance could be confined to a marginal – and ideally, shrinking – set of cases. For vari- ous reasons, this is now very far – and even further – from being the case. Throughout Europe, an increasing number of households have had to rely on social assistance and have become caught in the net it provides.The joint impact of technical change and the inter- nalization of markets is making it increasingly difficult for the economies of advanced cap- italist countries to generate a sufficient number of jobs that can be profitable while provid- ing those who hold them with a living wage.The outcome of this process is, increasingly, a ‘dual economy’, a ‘two-thirds society’, in which the most significant divide, as far as mate- rial welfare is concerned, is no longer the one that separates capitalists from workers, but the one that separates those who hold proper jobs from the rest of the population.There is no easy way of fighting this tendency. But the replacement of the safety net, in which the weakest and the unlucky get trapped, by a firm unconditional floor, on which they can securely stand – in other words, the replacement of a conditional minimum income scheme by a genuine basic income – is increasingly viewed as an indispensable ingredient in any such strategy.

The new social question thus basically turns around the failure of the existing labour market and social security institutions to ensure access to employment, while at the same time securely protecting people who are in or out of work from falling into poverty. In the same vein, Goodin (2000) made the case that the four pillars – the state, the market, the family and the community – on which social security rests are all crumbling. In the increasingly non-standardized world towards which we are moving, Goodin prefers some form of a basic-income type scheme above means tested and fine-tuned conditional social benefits: ‘Any standard categories or conditions fit any given individual’s actual experiences increasingly poorly, both occupationally (with the flexibilization of the labour market) and personally (with the flexibilization of the marriage market). So, if we want our social policy to cater to people’s real needs and actual circumstances, we will have to abandon categorical and conditional modes of social-policy making’ (ibid.: 147). In capsule form, the main policy objective to be kept in view in assessing the indispensability claim Van Parijs made for basic income in the early 1990s, is ‘full employment without poverty’. 6 However, compared to the early 1990s, the conditions for counteracting the ‘dual economy’ have become less favourable. On the political Centre-Left at least, this has considerably influenced the diagnosis of the new social question. It is now conceded that flexibility in the organi- zation of labour, footloose factors of production, and processes of tax competition, shifts in the employment volume between exposed and sheltered sectors in the econo- my, as well as structural increases in the demand for health care and pension provisions of rapidly ageing populations, have worsened the chances of attaining ‘full employment without poverty’.These developments have made it harder for national governments to pursue the goals of employment security and redistributive welfare that were formerly held to be viable, given sufficient political will.Yet at the same time, the Centre-Left is committed to showing that neither the ‘blind forces of globalization’, nor the adverse demographic shifts taking place in advanced welfare states, have robbed national gov- ernments of the policy space for pursuing broadly egalitarian strategies. In new and suitably adjusted ways, such strategies are still held to be within reach, depending on the development of the right kind of policies.7